With the SP1 work winding down, I thought that I’d take a moment and discuss three new performance improvements that are going into VSTO for SP1. We have listened to your feedback and understand that startup time is a major issue, and so we have focused on attempts to make the VSTO runtime load...

In this interview, I sit down with Stephen Peters , a developer on the Office client tools team in Visual Studio. Steve shows us a couple of tricks for how you can squeeze the best performance out of Office solutions built with Visual Studio (VSTO). He also shows how to finely control the way your custom...

It is very easy to customize the Ribbon in your VSTO extension.  All you need to do is to add a Ribbon (Visual Designer) to your solution, and it will appear when your solution is run without needing to do any more work.  Behind the scenes, the VSTO runtime reflects through your entire addin...

There have been a couple of blog posts about delay loading VSTO addins, and with Dev10 being released soon, it’s a good time to expand on the subject a little bit. This has been covered before, and I’ll avoid spending too much time here on topics that have already been covered. For an overview of...

Office 2010 brings in many new features to the Ribbon and Backstage extensibility. In order to take advantage of those changes in VSTO addins, you will need to update your ribbon XML projects to use the new Office 2010 schema. First, you will need to see if the schema is installed. To do this, look...